Adly, a startup that connects advertisers with celebrities willing to post promoted messages on social networks, recently raised $2 million in additional funding.
The new funding came from previous backer GRP Partners and new investor Siemer Ventures. Adly has now raised a total of $7.5 million.
The company also launched a new product this week. It’s the first thing you’ll see if you go to the Adly website â€" a button that says “Match Me Up!†which allows Adly to analyze a business’ existing content and followers, then find publishers who are a good match to “amplify†their content.
For example, when I signed in with my personal Twitter account, Adly said it found six celebrity publishers who, collectively, could increase my reach 61x and my engagement 31x. They include a blogger/entrepreneur with 103,000 followers, an analyst with 180,000 followers, and a podcaster with 199,000 followers. (I also tried to analyze TechCrunch’s account, but we have too many followers.) Who are these people? Well, you don’t actually get to find out until you actually start a campaign with Adly.
Walter Delph, who became Adly’s CEO a little more than a year ago, said this is part of his larger strategy. One of Adly’s big selling points is the fact that advertisers aren’t just getting access to a lot of eyeballs. By enlisting celebrity endorsers, they’re hopefully prompting lots of conversation and engagement, i.e. reach that’s “earned†rather than paid for. The company’s next step is building more tools to ensure that the conversation and engagement is happening.
To that end, Adly has been adding analytics to track the results of each campaign â€" the full reach of the message, the replies, the shares and the clicks. That dashboard, however, is really about looking back at a campaign (though customers get the data in real time, so they could adjust their spending accordingly). On the other hand, Delph said the celebrity matching tool is all about looking forward â€" it’s a way to get people started with Adly campaigns. He added that we can expect more features to come that take advantage of the company’s “reams and reams of data.â€
By the way, even though Adly is known as a celebrity endorsement network, it’s actually broader than that. The company has relationships with 75,000 influencers, and Delph estimated that only about 2,000 of them are celebrities in the traditional sense â€" “By celebrity, what I mean is, if you walked down the street you would recognize them.†The other 73,000 aren’t at that level, but they have influence that’s valuable to advertisers (at least when it comes to certain topics).
Ad.ly runs celebrity endorsements in social media. We help brands connect with consumers via the most influential celebrities, athletes and artists on the most popular platforms. Ad.ly is pioneering the celebrity endorsement market in digital media, tapping the intersection of the $50 billion annual global spend on endorsements and the $35 billion global spend in digital advertising. We have run 24,000 endorsements for 150 top brands, including Sony, NBC, Old Navy, Microsoft, Hyatt, American Airlines and more. Based in Beverly Hills,...
GRP Partners is a Los Angeles based Venture Capital firm with a national practice. Since 1982 the partners have invested in leading global brands including Starbucks, Costco, Overture, LastMinute.com and BillMeLater. GRP Partners manages over $1 billion and its most recent fund was closed in 2012. With professionals in Los Angeles and London, GRP has a global perspective when serving portfolio companies and seeking investment opportunities.
Siemer Ventures is a boutique venture capital firm that invests in early stage tech-related businesses that, we believe, are positioned for long-term sustainable growth. Because we prefer to work with start-ups at the beginning of their life cycle, we typically invest before institutional venture funds get involved. Our Principals are former start-up entrepreneurs who have successfully built and sold their own respective businesses prior to becoming venture investors. Our investment professionals have collectively invested in over 50 companies over...
Walter Delph is CEO of Adly Previously he served as SVP, Digital Media at News Corp, General Manager for Photobucket.com and Vice President, Strategy and Corporate Development for Fox Interactive Media. Before FOX, he was on the founding team that launched Verizon’s Television and content business (FIOS TV and vCast.) He also has served in Executive roles in both start-up companies and at large multi-national institutions (Time Warner and Goldman Sachs.) He is an advisor and angel...
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